MOVIE REVIEWS / L.A. FESTIVAL : Foreign Classics Highlight Weekend

Following are reviews of selected screenings in the Los Angeles Festival’s final weekend:

The Passion According to Berenice

Mexico Saturday at 6 p.m., Million Dollar Theater, 307 S. Broadway Repression, passion, seduction and betrayal are the themes of this 1976 Jaime Humberto Hermosillo film: common enough subjects in Latino literature, but rarely done on film with the mix of icy sophistication, cool eroticism and burning imagination we see here. The focal point of this (literally) incendiary drama is a lovely young widow, Berenice, imprisoned by social conventions, class rituals, and the pathetically invalid and helpless state of her dying grandmother. That familiar romantic symbol of “women’s” literature and soap operas, a handsome and sympathetic doctor, shows up--but the escape he offers proves illusory, his motives questionable, his ego transcendent. Hermosillo, as much as in “Dona Herlinda and Her Son,” subjects romantic fantasy to a cruel awakening; the ending will be difficult for some audiences to take. But “Berenice” is widely regarded as his best film--I prefer, actually, the Garcia Marquez-scripted “Mary, My Dearest”--and it’s one more contemporary foreign classic denied to most of us by the current distribution bottleneck.